Measures of central tendency help us locate the centre of the data, which allows us to make predictions about what is likely to happen. The most common measures of central tendency are the mean, the median, and the mode. This post constitutes Lesson 3 of the Basic Statistics Mini-Course.
You may be also interested in Analyzing data spread.
Key concepts covered in this post: mean, median, mode, effect of distribution on measures of central tendency.
The arithmetic mean (simply, the mean) is often called the average. Use the mean to predict a total.
The median is the middle number in an ordered list of data. Use the median to talk about a typical number of a set.
The mode is the most common number. Use the mode to talk about categorical data.
(Due to difficulties inserting some mathematical characters in WordPress, please finish reading this post in the embedded Google Doc below. You can jump to The mean.)
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